Reformed Villain’s Ex: Don’t Love Me, It’s Futile

Chapter 6 — Ratings, Revenge, and a Very Bad Billboard

The billboard blinked like a neon accusation over the intersection: AVA RETURNS — EXCLUSIVE TONIGHT. It was enormous and unapologetic, a fluorescent finger wagging at everybody who’d ever judged me. Cars slowed. People snapped photos. Someone live-streamed the image with a caption that read: *Is she back?* It was the sort of public spectacle that makes PR teams wet their ethical hands.

Mason called me before my coffee had finished cooling. “Lexi,” he said, voice electric, “ratings are through the roof. They want spin. They want commentary. They want you to be the headline—but on our terms.”

I leaned against the kitchen counter that no longer felt entirely like mine. Rowan was asleep in the other room, a breathing, tiny hostage to the drama that now used our lives for content. I could hear the faint domestic sounds of a house that hadn’t yet learned how to contain the internet.

“On your terms?” I repeated. “Mason, their idea of a ‘term’ is to sell me as a cautionary tale and then ask for royalties. I want control. I want boundaries. And I want my kid to stop being used as a prop by every petty executive with access to a camera.”

Mason sighed like a man who’d just discovered that capitalism occasionally had morals. “I can negotiate, but we have to be savvy. The rival network will eat us alive if we don’t give them something better. A live confessional. Raw. Real. A message that turns their manufactured narrative into a counter-narrative.”

“Or,” I said, setting the mug down like it was a gavel, “we show them what the business behind the curtain looks like. We leak the leak.”

Silence. Mason made a noise that suggested both admiration and alarm. “That’s … bold.”

It had to be bold. The rival network had launched a billboard and a trailer, and now the internet was already moving its pitchforks into formation. We could let them run their short-lived circus. Or we could take the microphone and point it at the clowns.

Damien arrived less like a man and more like a curated announcement. He stood in my doorway with a coat that smelled like command decisions and rain. The way he looked at the billboard was not softness. It was strategy.

“We do a preemptive press release,” he said. “We control the frame. We prepare legal. We… and Lexi,” he hesitated as if the word was unfamiliar to his mouth, “you go live. No tricks. No theatrics.”

“No theatrics?” I deadpanned. “That’s a hard sell coming from a man whose career is stylish austerity. But fine—no theatrics. Just truth with a killer lighting director.”

He allowed a ghost of a smile because even cold men have manners for numbers. “Keep Rowan away from the stage,” he said. “We do not need a toddler on camera tonight.”

As if on cue, Mason’s voice threaded into the room. “We can do a live stream on our platform at the same time as the rival’s premiere,” he said. “Double the air. Double the listeners. We air a behind-the-scenes doc for ten minutes, then you go live for a concise thirty. I’ll get Oliver’s team to scrub the worst of the footage. Legal will have statements ready. We can starve them of oxygen.”

Oliver, who’d been quietly monitoring like a man who enjoys the scent of impending battles, nodded. “I’ll trace all the source IPs. I’ll make sure whoever financed that pay-per-piece gets audited by more than outraged mothers.”

It was a war room of sorts, and I had come to like the smell of it—the caffeine and the formatting choices. People who had once been faceless behind brand decks suddenly had names and opinions. It made their actions feel more human, and therefore easier to outmaneuver.

We rehearsed my confessional like it was a Broadway preview for people with short attention spans. My script had to be sharp: human enough to earn sympathy, witty enough to become meme material, and honest enough that it made the rival network look tacky for being tacky.

“You have to admit,” Mason said during a break, “your brand is performing well. The public likes a redemption arc.”

“Redemption is a contract,” I said. “I prefer an honest pivot that pays for therapy.”

Two roast lines landed as if on cue. The first slipped out in conversation when Elliot Cross, who had volunteered his “expertise” in all things scandal, suggested I perform an emotional reveal. “If this is a show,” I told him, smiling sweetly, “then at least hire me a better script—or pay my ghostwriter.”

The second came later when a tabloid photographer tried to prod me with an intrusive question about Rowan. I didn’t even look at him. “You’re like a dog with a shiny thing,” I said, “if the shiny thing had a press badge and terrible dental insurance.”

It felt good. Witty, efficient. I liked the sound of my own defense.

The rival network launched their trailer at eight. It was glossy, edited with the kind of despair that looks good in close-up. Their narrator waxed dramatic: *From scandal to redemption… the truth you won’t believe.* The tagline made my teeth ache. People responded like they always do—clicks, anger, pity, debate. The online pitchforks chose their shape.

Our preemptive doc aired fifteen minutes later. It was rawer, shot on purpose to look raw, but it had substance: testimonials from people who’d known me in both iterations of my life—people who remembered Ava’s scrappiness and Eliza’s steady hand. I offered snippets of my old life, not to provoke nostalgia but to contextualize the woman who now had a toddler to protect. The internet gnawed on the nuance with ravenous curiosity.

Then it was my thirty minutes on camera. The stream started with a shaky frame and then steadied into my face, lit by careful lamps because authenticity without production looks like negligence. I had the kind of honesty that burns and the kind of snark that keeps it human.

“People like to define you in a sentence,” I began. “They like headlines because sentences are easy. I’d ask them to swap their headlines for a paragraph.” I told stories—small, sharp, funny. The audience laughed. They nodded. They liked it because I sounded like someone who’d been punished and then decided to be efficient about revenge.

Halfway through, Elliot’s name flashed on the control feed. He’d arranged for a journalist friend to call in with questions about the origin of the leaks. We had planned for controlled interruptions; we hadn’t planned for spontaneous, unscripted coverage of the litigation that might follow.

Then, fifteen minutes into my set, the stream hiccupped. Technical glitches are part of live television—the modern equivalent of stage fright. But this felt different. It wasn’t buffering. It was a forced pause, as if someone grabbed the internet by the collar and shook it.

Oliver swore softly, the kind of word that comes from years of dealing with servers and men who pretend tech is optional. “They’re trying to pull the plug,” he said. “A coordinated DDoS. They don’t want you to speak.”

“Typical,” I muttered. “If you can’t beat a woman’s narrative, shut off her microphone.”

Mason’s face twitched. “I have a backup,” he said, frantically, and I could see him pivot the stream to a secondary server. “We’ll switch to backup grounds.”

We switched. The stream came back. I exhaled like someone who’d been underwater.

“Don’t be surprised if they try other things,” Oliver warned. “These outfits have money and legal teams with teeth.”

I smiled into the lens with the calm that comes from being dangerously proud of your own stubbornness. “I went to great lengths to be interesting,” I said. “I will not let someone monetize my silence.”

And then it happened. Right as I was about to ask the audience for a small favor—some empathy, a little patience—the feed split in the control room. A second image bled across the screen, and for a heartbeat the live chat went wild with confusion. Then the image settled: a man in a suit, standing in a studio I recognized—the rival network’s studio—holding a folder.

“Good evening,” his voice boomed in our little stream, co-opted by whatever they’d done. “We have received new, exclusive footage.”

The control room went still. The rival network had found a way to piggyback their feed onto ours, like a parasite discovering a host. The presenter opened the folder with the kind of slow-motion theatricality that makes you suspect someone in production is whispering stage directions.

“First,” he said, “we have a clip of Lexi West—formerly known as Ava—taken years ago. It’s relevant because it shows things our viewers should know.”

Elliot’s jaw tightened, visibly. Damien went very still and then, just as quickly, stood up and stalked to the door like a man who’d been given the right to take the stage by force.

No one in the control room moved fast enough to stop the feed. Our stream split into a dozen smaller streams as outlets began to clip the interruption. The presenter lifted a small device—an old USB stick, inexpensive, dramatic in its ubiquity—and waved it like an emblem.

The room smelled briefly of burnt coffee and fear. A thousand fingers reached for keyboards. My chest tightened. We’d rehearsed responses for leaks, for paparazzi, for lawsuits. We had not rehearsed for an opponent that could h****k our live feed and play a tape from a past that I’d thought buried.

My producer, who’d ever been a small man on my old marketing decks, bent toward me and whispered, “If they have footage—if they have real footage—then they control the narrative.”

I closed my eyes for one second and opened them like a person stepping into light. “Then we stop them,” I said, which was about as theatrical as I allowed myself to be. “We expose the hand that feeds them.”

Oliver, always eerily composed, was already dialing. Mason was already pivoting cameras. Damien — predictably — was already moving like a man with a plan for revenge.

They broadcast a clip. It was grainy and older, a different version of my laugh, a younger me making choices that looked, in hindsight, less than flattering. Twelve seconds. Fifteen? It felt longer.

And then, right before the rival host could milk it for maximum indignation, my phone buzzed with an unknown number sending a single message: *Stop. Tonight. Midnight. Meet us at the old pier. Bring proof that you remember.*

I turned to look at Damien, at Mason, at Oliver—at everyone who’d become my accidental army—and decided, in a hush-thin moment that tasted like adrenaline and bad decisions, that I would go. The screen behind me still showed the rival host smirking, but my phone’s message pulsed with a promise: someone from the past wanted to speak. I had a choice: stay and fight the tape in studio, or follow the shadow that might unpick the whole story.